Yesterday I have been busy the whole day working out my MSDN article on the custom notification channels in SharePoint Portal Server with some extra demos, a demo VPC and a detailed study of how alerts are working at the level of WSS. Regarding the last one, I have a couple of ideas to extend the alerts WSS infrastructure with custom delivery channels on its own. All this of course in the context of the hardcore SharePoint sessions Jan and I will deliver next month on DevDays.

In the same context I have finally got the time to go through the installation of the latest Office Live Communications Server (LCS 2005). See my previous posting for the links to download the evaluation versions.

I had some troubles since I am not really a system engineer, so topics like DNS configuration are rather painful for me. But eventually I managed to have everything up-and-running. When going through the same pain, here are some useful resources I have consulted and that helped me solving my problems:

• The deployment paper very well describes all the steps you need to undertake.
• There is also Tom the LCS kid (:-)) who has a number of good postings related to LCS 2005.
• And don't forget you can download the full MOC course on deploying LCS 2003 which is helpful to learn the architecture, the concepts and the terminology used

The installation is straight-forward with it seems a new way for MS to report on the different steps done and the results of it. I personally like the way the log is presented after each of the installation steps. Very helpful and I hope they make this a standard for the other products:

When installed, the Active Directory schema is extended so that you can enable LCS per user:

I also like the new management console. Very clean and helpful. I don't want to be negative but I hope the SharePoint product team has a look at this and provide us with the same centralized console so that we don't have to navigate through this jungle of administration pages.

And final step is to install the new Windows Messenger 5.1 and set up some communication between two users.

One thing that I really miss here is a clean managed way of programming against all of this. Would it not be nice to be able to make use of this infrastructure and for example send alerts to messenger from within your own applications (or SharePoint :-)). For MSN Messenger, you can go via MessageCast and send your alerts (paying a fee of course). Can we do this for the Windows Messenger also? The answer is yes and no. Yes it is possible but it is not that easy to do. It involves communicating with the RTC API which is not helpful in a lot of cases. There is also one related article that can be useful but it is not managed code. I see a real opportunity for partners here to come up with some kind of managed wrapper. Or are we expecting this from MS itself?